The radical left case for leaving the EU

Our support of Leave wishes to urgently engage with an unconditional polemic against an increasingly centralized EU, an inherently authoritarian political and economic structure which is beyond rectification from within.

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George Osborne campaigning for Remain in Belfast. Niall Carson/PAimages. All rights reserved.As the 23rd of June is fast approaching,
the dilemma of the EU referendum in Britain revolves around the concept of
European integration versus national sovereignty, with both camps being
inadequately convincing.

When the change of political paradigm one envisages is
a version of civic republicanism which aspires to direct democracy, both
nationalism and Europeanism/globalization prove to be feeble answers to the
impasses of contemporary political and economic neoliberalism.

Our points of
criticism in regards to the available options are discussed below.

Leave: a lost direction

Although this is where our preference lies,
we need to acknowledge that the major fault of Leave is the fact that it has
been taken over by nationalist elitism. The main stake among the supporters of
Leave is not an independence that would create a political space for citizens
to think, act and formulate their own ideas about the society they want to live
in.

In fact, pro-Leave public opinion in Britain adopts the arguments of the
governing and ruling groups, who want to maintain the myth and political
reality of Britain as a great center of power. Thus, competition in industry
and world-wide economic domination are integral parts of the Leave argument, an
obnoxious jingoistic attitude which has nothing to do with the reasons the
authors of this article support independence (of any country or body politic)
from the EU.

Some influential British figures (like Boris Johnson and Nigel
Farage) are articulating a discourse based on the alliance between the mob and
the capital (to use the concept elaborated by Hannah Arendt by which she
described the reasons for the expansion of the Pan-movements); a concord
between what the depoliticized masses desire (the illusion of national
greatness, even at the expense of their own welfare) and the policies promoted
by the oligarchs (the maximization of the exploitative capacities of what is
left of British "greatness").

The empty signifier "take back control",
which constitutes the main slogan of the Leave camp, does not address another
important question: who takes control and how do they make use of it?

There is
a tacit agreement that the government will take this control and will somehow
provide (or not provide) for the population. This is a far cry from the precise
answers that are necessary to the question of the control of political power.

The basic categorization of the political systems introduced by Aristotle
(Monarchy - power of the one, Oligarchy - power of the few, Democracy - power
of the demos) is not taken at face value by modern political thought and
theory; consequently, there is a generalized and profound lack of discussion
regarding the distribution of power in society.

The result of this is a gross
misuse of fundamental political concepts such as autonomy and democracy:
everyone thinks we are living in a democracy (albeit in an incomplete form),
and (almost) no one is willing to associate it with anything more than
universal suffrage and a few more liberal rights.

Hence, an utterly false
conception is built around the Leave campaign, claiming that independence from
the EU will automatically strengthen democracy, while it is more than evident
that power will continue being unequally distributed across the population of
Britain if the masses insist on political apathy.

Remain: illusions and reality

The Remain camp mostly consists of
supporters of the Labour Party, the Greens, and the centrist blocks. These
forces claim that a withdrawal from the EU will possibly strengthen the Tories
and will render the National Healthcare System (NHS), the universities and the
welfare state vulnerable to their austerity policies.

On the one hand, this
argument lacks historical validity since it ignores that the welfare state in
Britain was not built thanks to the country's membership in the EU. In fact,
the NHS and the welfare state are products of constant popular struggles for
social and economic equality.

On the other hand, when many supporters of the
Left (more precisely of the Labour Party and the DiEM25 movement) employ the
survival of the NHS as a Remain argument, they are exhibiting a great deal of
elitism, since they indirectly advocate that the people of Britain are
incapable of building a fair society beyond austerity without some protection
from such a supranational superstructure as the EU, which
they simultaneously recognize as democratically deficient.

Furthermore, as
Mary Kaldor stressed in the DiEM conference in London, the British deep
state and the imperialist imaginary (which is diffused within the Leave
campaign, precisely because the Left has completely abandoned euroscepticism,
which led to the exploitation of empty signifiers such as "national
independence" by the aggressive domestic right) will make Britain "a
very nasty authoritarian neoliberal country" in case of a Brexit.

Such
demeaning statements reveal the elitist and demophobic attitude of the liberal
left, which considers the ordinary citizens of Britain unworthy to build a
democratic country and reject the authoritarianism of Westminster without the
guidance of father figure superstructures and politically correct politicians.

At the same time, the main concern of the
British Left is the maintenance of the freedom of movement, according to which
foreign nationals have the right to live and work in the country without
restrictions. Their reluctance to sacrifice some privileges the EU has given to
European citizens, makes them adopt a symmetrical approach, by supporting the
freedom of movement of labour, while at the same time they profess to oppose
austerity.

Although austerity in Britain has not been imposed by the EU per se,
they refuse to acknowledge that Britain within the EU will face enormous
challenges in case the country attempts to implement a different fiscal policy.
Furthermore, the austerity policies applied by the EU in the European South,
particularly in Greece, Cyprus and Spain - policies characterized as
neocolonial - are much more brutal than the ones imposed by the Tories, as
Yanis Varoufakis (the founder of the DiEM 25) has said.

Hence, reluctance
to break with the EU, and the adherence of the freedom of movement as a sine qua non of cosmopolitanism and
instrumental anti-nationalism, is in fact a defence of neocolonialism, and
masks the jingoistic tendencies of the German and the Benelux oligarchs.

Additionally, the Labour Party together with
the social democratic centre-left blocks are conceived that a superstructure such as the EU is
the appropriate means in order to rid Europe of cleavages and ethnic hatred,
resorting even to indiscriminately naming and shaming their opponents as
"racist", once they start arguing in favour of the dissolution of the EU.

The
exaggerated labeling of all eurosceptic voices as "xenophobic" masks
the outright racist stance of the EU against Greece, Cyprus and Portugal, a
racism fueled by social Darwinism and reflected in the propaganda about the
"lazy and bankrupt Greeks/southerners".

In fact, anti-Hellenism and
social Darwinism have been bridged by the instrumentality of the
euro-austerity, building a discourse that echoes the nineteenth century
colonialist European imaginary, which relied on 'scientific' race-thinking, the
official discourse of the European bourgeoisie, aiming to justify imperialism.

Neutrality and the price of European
integration

At first sight what is common in both
campaigns is that the utilitarian aspect of the arguments prevails, and this
becomes obvious by the Referendum leaflets that have been circulating in the
last few weeks.

Both Remain and Leave use vague keywords and signifiers which
resonate deeply in the ideological make-up of a large part of the British
population: terrorism, immigration, economic policy. Both camps attempt to
stress their capacity to better control these issues if their own policies are
implemented.

Most of the British are convinced that what they need to do to
maintain "our prosperity" is make "our industry" more
competitive, be in charge of "our resources" and have "our own
government" decide about the laws and regulations. However, no debate
exists on the identity of this "our". Who is included in this
collectivity that the "our" is supposed to signify? Do the British
"industry", "prosperity", "resources" and
"government" really belong to the community of the voters?

The lack
of self-examination on this issue by those who subscribe to this rhetoric is
not surprising, considering the poverty of contemporary political thought in
Britain and worldwide. What is particular about the British case is, as
mentioned above, the emphasis on utilitarian or technocratic demands, and the
complete absence of anthropological and cultural concerns.

The British are not
asking themselves what kind of society they want to live in, and whether there
is a need for changes in the prevailing social and cultural institutions, in
the existing anthropological types, and in the of ways of living (and not of
lifestyle). If this kind of inquiry seems out of reach for the majority of the
population, it is absent even in a seminal form which would allow small nuclei
of public discussion to exist and survive, a process which we saw happening
during the Scottish and Greek referendums (despite obvious problems in the
conduct of those referendums).

This 'false-dilemma' argument promoted by many anarchist and Marxist
sects conceals a reluctance to confront the hot issues here and now, and a type
of idolatrous fascination with ideological puritanism (we want pure socialism
or nothing), or an existential adherence to certain liberal/left-wing lifestyle
tenets, such as cosmopolitanism, instrumental anti-nationalism, utopian
solidarity, and Marxist revolutionary anti-capitalism.

At the same time, (as we have
stressed elsewhere) the EU is a direct consequence of the capitalist
development itself. To be more precise, capital in order to expand needs to
transgress borders and geopolitical constraints, leading to the concentration
of powers into a transnational ultra-centralized superstructure.

Thus the
(albeit unsatisfactory) body politic of the nation state is marginalized, while
civic nationalism (that is, the common world which used to provide a certain
meaning) gradually declines. The new emerging identity is one that is appropriate
to the newly created superstructure, addressing the populations not as French,
Germans, Italians etc, but as European citizens.

Nonetheless, the European
identity is a vague signifier, since it is premised on the fusion of
twenty-eight different nations, with disparate customs, history, languages (and
internal subdivisions which further amplify variations), a hodgepodge of
multiple features that could hardly constitute a precise attachment.

Hence, the
determination of what European culture/identity is, becomes an impossible task,
as opposed to the less complex imaginary meanings of single nation-states. What
the liberal left has utterly failed to acknowledge is that the deconstruction
of civic nationalism was not about bringing harmony and trans-European solidarity.

As Hannah Arendt elaborated in the Origins
of Totalitarianism (1951), the weakening of European nation-states during
the inter-war period resulted in the traumatic collapse of civic institutions.
At the same time, substitute nationalisms emerged - racist, supra-national,
tribal, deeply anti-Semitic, aggressive and highly authoritarian - led to the
rise of totalitarian regimes, to the outbreak of the Second World War and the
Holocaust.

In our age, European integration (as
aforementioned), has not only failed to create solidarity bonds among the
European people (according to the liberal or post-90s left-wing vision), but
has further led to the intensification of cleavages, whilst the outbreak of the
financial crisis and the inability of the highly centralized European
institutions to tackle the catastrophic hyperinflation of debt and prevent the
expected onslaught of poverty, gives the final blow.

The end of civic (or else
state) nationalism fostered the emergence of new nationalisms (as substitute
forms of attachment) accompanied by rampant Islamophobia, anti-Hellenism,
xenophobia and ethnic (white) nationalism (particularly in Eastern Europe).

Additionally, the decline of the nation-state, in view of European integration
and globalization has not liberated man from a centralized authoritarian
apparatus. It has destroyed the body politic, inasmuch as the right 'to have
rights' is gradually fading away, since power is removed from the nation to
supranational technocratic institutions.

Concluding remarks

Our support of Leave wishes to urgently
engage with an unconditional polemic against an increasingly centralized EU, an
inherently authoritarian political and economic structure which is beyond
rectification from within. At the same time, the Leave we advocate is clearly
not in alliance or concord with nationalism of all kinds.

However, our strong
objections to the three available options (Leave, Remain, and Abstention), do
not allow us to refrain from taking an active stance on this matter: momentum
must be gained against global power politics and in favour of the transference
of decision-making power to the people.

Even if we consider that this people,
at this time and place, is not fully capable of living up to its responsibility
towards political, social and cultural emancipation, even if its motives do no
coincide with our idea of democratic, humanist politics, we still maintain that
it is most appropriate that they carry the weight and face the consequences of
their political choices.

In case Brexit wins, will Britain end up a nasty
authoritarian state, or will it shift towards socialism (which the EU abhors)? This
lies entirely in the hands of the British people.

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